Gladys Byers
THE DAY THE HOTEL BURNED IN HARVEY, DECEMBER 1926
This story, by Gladys Byers, was told to Bill Randall, August 2, 1995. Mrs. Byers was 12 years old when this explosion happened. She remembers the event vividly.In December 1926, the hotel owned by Mrs. Allan Robison burned to the ground. An explosion occurred at eleven forty prior to noon. Mrs. Robison's son, Kenneth, and Mr. Hartley McGee were in the basement filling the acetylene lights because electricity was not available at that time. The door of the coal burning furnace was open and it is believed that the fumes from the acetylene were ignited.
Mrs. Robison was standing at the large double doors which were located at the front entrance. These doors were blown across the front lawn. Mrs. Robison was blown out with the doors and she was found lying on them by my father, Tom Cleghorn, who was the first person to arrive on the scene after hearing the explosion. She had a badly injured ankle and multiple bruises.
One of her daughters asked my father to get the piano out. When he went inside, all that remained of the piano was a mass of tangled strings and splinters of wood. A vase sitting on top of the piano wasn't broken and for years, Miss Margaret Robison had it on an organ that was not damaged. The organ was in a room with a trap door and a stairway leading to the basement. The trap door was blown open and the only damage in the room was a large nail which was driven into the arm of a chair by the explosion.
In those days, there were agents in the CPR Station twenty-four hours a day. One of the night operators was asleep on the third floor of the hotel. I watched him come down on a rope from his bedroom window. Part of the stairway in the front hall was blown away and one of the Robison daughters who was upstairs had to jump from the landing and was caught by a boarder at the hotel.
Kenneth and Hartley received burns. Hartley was hospitalized for some time in Fredericton. They were able to escape through the doors of the basement which had been blown out.
There was no fire brigade in Harvey so it was difficult to fight any fire. The roof of the house across the road from the hotel caught fire several times, and snowballs were thrown up to several people on the roof to help extinguish the fire.